Saturday, 9 May 2015

Why You Must Go for Sex Rather Than Taking Cocaine?

Twenty-eight-year old Mike was full of
enthusiasm as he showed his newly found lover to our correspondent the
previous week. He was at the wedding ceremony of his longtime friend,
Olusola, when he met Esther. Petite, 5 ft 6 inches, fair complexion,
calmness and a set of white shiny teeth obviously endeared Mike to the
Ekiti State indigene Accounting graduate.

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Esther was also quick enough to flaunt her engagement ring to our correspondent to prove a point: I have found ‘him.’

After the meeting, Mike narrated to Saturday PUNCH
how he had been having sleepless nights ever since he met Esther. “I
love her and I am serious about this. I couldn’t have proposed to marry
her in just a short while if I didn’t. I’m drunk in her love,” he
crowned it all.

Well, scientists have discovered that
Mike’s condition is normal. According to researches, falling in love
with someone has the same effect on the brain as someone who is high on
cocaine.

An American anthropologist and human
behaviour researcher, Dr. Helen Fisher, conducted a series of studies on
the brain chemistry of love and found out that the same
chemicals—dopamine and norepinephrine—are at play in the brain of
someone who is falling in love and one who is high on cocaine.

Fisher suggested that if the words,
“smoking crack cocaine,” were replaced with “falling in love,” the
latter also leads to enhanced mood, heightened sexual interest, a
feeling of increased self-confidence, greater conversational prowess and
intensified consciousness.

She added that a further common marker of
both falling in love and smoking cocaine is a clear stimulatory effect.
Users of cocaine feel that the drug sharpens their focus and allows
them to achieve an almost superhuman state of electrifying purpose.
Making this connection between the two states of being may provide
insight into some of the commonly reported experiences associated with
falling in love. For example, the similarity between the two states may
explain why new love prompts us to float and flit between our daily
activities with a certain glow, bursting with vitality and charged with
energy, all while whistling a cheerful tune.

However, Fisher said that unlike crack
cocaine, the effects of “falling in love” persist for weeks, months,
even two years in some cases. The stimulatory effect of “love crack” may
also help explain how lovers are able to stay up night after night for
weeks or months on end, staring into each other’s eyes and whispering
words of adoration to each other despite having full days of work.

Like Fischer, a researcher and
psychologist at the New York State University, Arthur Aron, found out
that falling in love affects the brain much like drug addiction.
“Falling in love can wreak havoc on your body (just like doing cocaine).
Your heart races, your tummy gets tied up in knots, and you’re on an
emotional roller coaster, feeling deliriously happy one minute and
anxious and desperate the next,” he said in his findings.

His research showed that these intense,
romantic feelings come from the brain, and not from the heart, like most
people perhaps think.

In the study, which he co-authored with a
clinical neurology and brain anatomy specialist, Lucy Brown, the
researchers looked at the magnetic resonance images of the brains of 10
women and seven men who claimed to be deeply in love. The length of
their relationships ranged from one month to less than two years. The
participants were shown photographs of their beloved and photos of a
similar-looking person.

The brains of the smitten participants
reacted to photos of their sweethearts, producing emotional responses in
the same parts of the brain normally involved with motivation and
reward.

“Intense passionate love uses the same
system in the brain that gets activated when a person is addicted to
drugs,” said Aron. “In other words, you start to crave the person you’re
in love with like a drug.”

Brown, who also participated in another
ground-breaking research about the brain’s reward system with human
behaviour specialist, Fisher, found out that the mechanism responsible
for the feeling of pleasure in response to stimuli ranging from a sweet
taste on the tongue to a message received on a social network was also
responsible for the creation of habits and addictions.

Brown and Fisher have scanned the brains
of hundreds of lovesick or broken-hearted people. All were scanned
during the three months after falling in love or after difficult
separations.

They compared the scans, and after a long
series of scientific articles, they began to carefully interpret what
Brown called “the almost complete paralysis of the decision-making
system.”

“When you fall in love, basic impulses
interfere with discretion, and there are chemicals released in the brain
that affect perception and behaviour. These chemicals have been
identified over the past two decades, and their effects on mood and on
mental states are now very clear,” Brown explained.

In the findings of Brown and Fisher which
were published in 2010, it was demonstrated that the way the brain
reacts when someone views a photo of a person they compulsively desire
is similar to the way it reacts after using cocaine.

“Falling in love is an addiction,” Fisher
declared after the results were published. “My guess is that modern
addictions such as nicotine, drugs, sex or gambling simply capture the
same internal channels which were developed millions of years ago by the
brain for the feeling of romantic attraction.”

In support of the study, another
psychologist, Shauna Springer, said that all relationships begin with
the “cocaine rush” phase. She described the phase as an initial period
of intense, highly pleasurable bonding based on the mutual fantasy that
the two lovers are ideally matched and perfectly suited for each other.

She maintained that it is during the
“cocaine rush” phase that a feeling of having found one’s soul mate has
tremendous emotional pull on new lovers.

She said in her study, “I would not be
the first person to draw a comparison between the state of falling in
love and the state of feeling high on drugs. We’re not talking about the
slightly buzzed feeling you might get from drinking a glass or two of
wine, but rather about the high-octane euphoria associated with smoking
crack cocaine. Falling in love is the best high you can get without
breaking any laws.”

A consultant psychologist based in Lagos,
Dr. Olubola Adebowale, said she couldn’t agree less to the
studies—drawing from her personal experience about 15 years ago when she
first fell in love.

She said that when two people fall in
love, the brain takes charge more than the heart, adding that the brain
chemicals which are released are similar to those with someone who takes
cocaine. She said, “That is why you see a guy who can go to any length
to do for his lover what he cannot do for anybody else and likewise, the
lady. Love intoxicates, just like doing drugs. You dream of the person
and see them everywhere you go. It’s more like hallucination.

“It has happened to many of us at some
point in time. So instead of doing cocaine and other drugs, now there is
an alternative for people: fall in love.”